Search

New Zealand-born singer-songwriter Tex Morton is remembered as the father of Australian country music today.

He was Australasia’s country music star, beginning his career as a recording artist in 1936. The star of his own records, radio show, travelling rodeo show, how-to-play-guitar packs and comic books, he was a genuine celebrity throughout the tumultuous 1940s. With his fresh-faced looks, musical talent and self-promotional flair, he was sometimes mobbed by young women at his public appearances: a pop star before the term entered the vocabulary.

You can find many an admiring write-up of Morton’s career by country music specialists and aficionados. They note that he left Australia for ten years at the end of the 1940s, spending most of the 1950s touring Canada as a stage hypnotist.

What you won’t read is that Morton had a seriously troubled personal life before he left Australia in the 1940s.

In 1945, at a time when he was married with twin sons, Morton and the rodeo performer Lance Skuthorpe Jr were charged with the joint rape of a 16 year-old girl at a party in Darlinghurst, Sydney. The charges were dropped a couple of weeks after their first court appearance. Presumably this was because it was the girl’s word against theirs. Morton and Skuthorpe both admitted that they had sex with the young woman, but claimed it was consensual.

Not surprisingly, Morton split with his wife Marjorie around the time that the rape charge hit the press. He was back in the newspapers in 1946 when his estranged wife sued him for maintenance. She claimed that he only ever made irregular payments to help support her and their sons. The judge agreed. Morton’s attempt to avoid playing regular child support was unsuccessful, but only after he and Marjorie had traded bitter allegations about each other’s behaviour in the witness box.

In 1950, the Western Australian showman Bob Carroll made headlines in Perth by claiming that his wife Dorothy had conducted a long-running affair with Morton in the 1940s. Dorothy Carroll (later Ricketts) had performed alongside Morton in his roadshows as Sister Dorrie, the singing cowgirl.

It is fascinating that even though these scandals were widely reported, they had little impact on Morton’s celebrity at the time. They had also disappeared from public memory by the time he returned to Australia in the 1960s, hailed as the founding father of the local country music scene.

Final note

The musician-historian Toby Martin and I have an article coming out in the next issue of Australian Feminist Studies discussing the troubled relationship to women and domesticity in Tex Morton’s music and life.

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

5 Responses to “Tex Morton, Troubled Celebrity”

Love Tex, so do my kids, love larrikins also, the older Aussie type…check newstead Short Story tattoo (www.newsteadtattoo.org) in May 2013 for “The Tex Morton Story” done by local yodeller and Aussie country larrikin Archer Shepherd

It would be very difficult. It would be worth speaking to staff at the State Records NSW about whether there might be any documentation of the charges brought before the court – but generally speaking, decent documentation only exists if a case went to trial…

Larrikins: A History

From the true-blue Crocodile Hunter to the blue humour of Stiffy and Mo, from the Beaconsfield miners to The Sentimental Bloke, Australia has often been said to possess a ‘larrikin streak’.

Today, being a larrikin has positive connotations and we think of it as the key to unlocking the Australian identity: a bloke who refuses to stand on ceremony and is a bit of scally wag. When it first emerged around 1870, however, larrikin was a term of abuse, used to describe teenage, working-class hell-raisers who populated dance halls and cheap theatres. Crucially, the early larrikins were female as well as male.

Larrikins: A History takes a trip through the street-based youth subculture known as larrikinism between 1870 and 1920. Swerving through the streets of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, it offers a glimpse into the lives of Australia’s first larrikins, including bare knuckle-fighting, football-barracking, and knicker-flashing teenage girls. Along the way, it reveals much that is unexpected about the development of Australia’s larrikin streak to present fascinating historical perspectives on hot ‘youth issues’ today, including gang violence, racist riots, and raunch culture among adolescent girls.